Heathen's Halt Re-Listens to: Buckethead's Island of Lost Minds (Ep. 3)

(WARNING: In my videos I use a robot filter on my voice. If you have an issue with that, and if you're not a Buckethead fan, don't watch or listen, because this isn't for you.

Also, the basic audio recordings for this video occurred a few months back when I didn't have a camera, either external or in my computer, so I rigged a basic "animation" of my face to speak whenever i was speaking, and to basically work as my "facecam." this made the video take an absolutely enormous amount of time and effort, as I had to drop pretty much every other project I may have had for almost a month to finish it, devoting several hours almost every day for that time. The parts for it, the basic parts, were sitting in a vault for much longer and I'm honestly kind of ashamed I didn't complete it much sooner, but that's the case. Also the audio was screwing up during the commentary on the music, making it basically impossible to interpret, so i had to stop after the first song and delete all mid-song commentary. if i was adding in that commentary, this video would take even longer to make. If this is a problem to you then I don't recommend trying to watch either.)

Recorded right around the end of Buckethead's stint with Guns n Roses, Island of Lost Minds is the first to be pretty much an exclusive collaboration between Big B and Dan Monti, an engineer and multi-instrumentalist (primarily drums/drum machine programming and bass on Buckethead records) he met on the crew of GnR, forming the nucleus of the unstoppable duo known as Bucketheadland, which has put out hundreds upon hundreds of albums since, essentially keeping the essence of a band alive even though Buckethead is generally considered a solo artist. It's also the first, I believe, of a series of tour-only albums to be pressed by the duo, I guess as a marketing campaign to get people to come to his/their shows more often, since they were selling essentially exclusive items that would later on becoming collector's pieces. Some of them, like Crime Slunk Scene, which I think was the last one for a while, became some of his most beloved albums- so much so that he brought them back as re-pressings after they were thought to be out-of-print.

Still part of Buckethead's primarily "experimental" era, which made up the vast majority of his music until it slowly started becoming more palatable with albums like Pepper's Ghost and so on, this is yet again another total tonal whiplash compared to Electric Tears and Colma, the black sheep of the first decade and a half of his output. There is absolutely no beauty to be found anywhere on this album- just harsh, metallic, unpleasant guitar harmonies, chords, pitch manipulations and other experimentations. Dan Monti doesn't appear to be used to contributing accompaniment to this kind of crazy music yet, and his drum loops are pretty repetitive and slow, giving this album a sort of electronic/hip-hop/industrial/groove/doom backbone not found on their other albums (sometimes, like in the intro of Ice Pick Through Eyes, reminding me of Black Sabbath), almost giving it a laidback, lazy, "island" component even though it's got such a stinging metal component, in a way, kind of really fitting the concept of the title. There is also a very notable lack of bass guitar on most of the album, and it's presumable this is again, because Dan wasn't used to contributing to writing music this far-out. All in all not one of the better albums done by the duo in my opinion. But they stuck it out and have learned to gel and coalesce into rock n roll's most productive musical duo in history, and both well and truly understand each other now, getting to know each other ever the better, even by their next album Inbred Mountain, and especially by the fourth tour album Crime Slunk Scene, which is beloved by all for good reason.

Timestamps:
Intro- 0:00
1. Island of Lost Minds- 1:47
2. Shock Therapy Side Show- 6:34
3. Dream Darts- 11:38
4. Vacuum Tube Implants- 18:37
5. Skull Scrape- 22:53
6. Ice Pick Through Eyes- 27:30
7. Four-Side Triangle- 32:03
8. Korova Binge Bar- 34:14
9. Bruised Eye Sockets- 41:50
10. Mud of the Gutter- 44:57
11. The Cuckoo Parade- 49:22
12. Viravax- 56:00
13. Lobotomizer (the Scariest Rollercoaster of All Time)- 1:01:34
Closing Thoughts- 1:05:27
Ice Pick Through Eyes- 27:30